Fund-Raisers for Arts Stay on Their Toes

The evening had something for everyone.

Music.

Dance.

Drama.

And City Councilman Evan Anderson Braude prancing about in white tights and a blue velvet jacket.

The event’s immediate purpose was to raise money for the Long Beach Ballet, which recently announced a $100,000 deficit primarily due to poor attendance at last year’s tour of “The Nutcracker.” In fact, the elegant $100-a-plate banquet--at which Braude gamely joined a team of professional dancers in a spoof of their art--kicked off what organizers described as an aggressive fund-raising effort and new attempts to attract broader community support.

“Until now we’ve concentrated on artistic excellence,” said David Wilcox, artistic director of the 5-year-old company. “This is the other side of the coin.”

Said Carla Gordon, a member of the ballet’s board of directors: “We realize that we’re now in a new phase. We have to broaden our base of support, develop new constituency.”

In reality, the ballet is conforming to what seems to have become a pattern among Long Beach-based performing arts groups.

Four years ago, the Long Beach Civic Light Opera underwent a major reorganization after announcing a $900,000 deficit. More recently, the Long Beach Symphony canceled most of a season and almost went bankrupt following disclosures that it was more than $758,000 in debt. And last week, the Long Beach Opera--which has seen its operating deficit double since 1982 to $120,000 today--decided to forgo mounting a major production next fall to concentrate on fund raising.

What’s going on here? Are local performing arts going the way of the horse and buggy? Is Long Beach destined to become a town without art?

Other Groups Struggling

People in the arts offer various explanations for the money woes. To begin with, they say, arts groups all over the country are struggling financially to overcome the vagaries of an uncertain economy, with major deficits becoming common. Beyond that, they say, Southern California--and Long Beach in particular--offers special challenges for would-be performers.

“The life style is not theatrically oriented,” Wilcox said. “It’s more backyard barbecue and leisure oriented. People would rather watch (a performance) on TV” than see it in person.

In Long Beach, he says, the situation has traditionally been made even tougher because of competition from Los Angeles and its more established and well-known arts groups.

But all that may be changing. After years of obscurity, many local patrons believe, Long Beach is finally coming into its own as a center for the performing arts. And it is that development, ironically, to which many attribute most directly the recent financial problems suffered by Long Beach performing groups. Caught in the shaky transition from small to large, they are having to spend more money to carve out competitive niches in an art community rapidly expanding beyond old parochial bounds of quality and appeal.

The single most significant factor contributing to that expansion, most agree, is the Terrace Theater, which opened in 1978 and now houses the city’s four major performance groups.

Until then, Long Beach had the atmosphere of an artistic backwater, with resident groups performing in small-town fashion at local high school auditoriums or in the old Long Beach Municipal Auditorium. With the coming of the elegant 3,141-seat Terrace as part of the vast new Convention and Entertainment Center, however, sights were raised.

“The convention center is the common denominator,” said Martin Wiviott, producer for the Long Beach Civic Light Opera, which used to perform at Jordan High School. “Here we are and here’s this fabulous complex and now we have to do things to suit this gorgeous scenery. That theater demands production values because of its scope and its size.”

Costlier Productions

For many groups, moving into the Terrace Theater meant spending much more money on much more elaborate productions than previously possible.

“We went in there with wonderful things in mind to do,” Wiviott said, “and over the three or four years it took to put (them) in place (we overspent our budget). All of the huge costs associated with going into a huge complex like that catch up with you and you have to reorganize until you are able to do things that match your income.”

To date, most of those reorganizations appear to be succeeding.

Since 1984, Wiviott said, the CLO has reduced its operating deficit from $900,000 to $400,000, and expects to break even within two years. That has been accomplished, he said, largely by relying on the interest income generated by an endowment set up in 1979--which now amounts to about $750,000--and by staging productions with broad audience appeal such as “Evita,” “A Chorus Line” and other shows starring such well-known performers as Edie Adams and Kathy Rigby.

And in an even more dramatic turnaround, the Long Beach Symphony has managed to reduce a 1985 deficit of $758,000 to one expected to be around $100,000 by next month’s fiscal year-end, largely by reorganizing the orchestra’s management, persuading creditors like the Bank of America to renegotiate outstanding debts and the City of Long Beach to forgive $100,000 of a $175,000 loan.

“We’ve worked very hard in the past two years,” said Mary Newkirk, the symphony’s general manager. “The key has been the strong board leadership we’ve recruited.”

Evidence of Local Support

Lindsay Shields, executive director of the Public Corp. for the Arts, a private, nonprofit group set up to aid local artistic endeavors, points to these successes as evidence of strong support for the arts among local residents. “Relative to other cities the same size,” she says, “the arts in Long Beach are healthy.”

But they will not reach true financial maturity, she adds, until local patrons and opinion makers begin viewing the performing arts as viable businesses, the kind that benefit the city.

“Nobody pays any attention to the number of people the arts bring into Long Beach each year,” she said. While the city this year will contribute about $320,000 to local arts groups--more than double the amount of three years ago, when it first began underwriting local arts efforts--Shields said she would like to see a serious marketing survey done to determine whether that level of support is commensurate with the industry’s benefit to the city.

“Arts probably bring in more people than the Grand Prix,” she said. “One of our major, long-term goals is to make people respect the arts as business.”

Recruiting New Patrons

That effort seemed also to be part of what was happening at the recent ballet banquet, where longtime patrons mixed with new-found or prospective supporters--many of them business people--who organizers said they had made a special effort to recruit.

“This gets you interested enough to go see one of their performances,” said Bob Treese after several hours at the downtown Ramada Renaissance banquet, which, in addition to the dance spoofs, featured a performance by composer Ben Weisman and dancing to the live sounds of The Coasters. The owner of a zinc die casting company in Huntington Park, Treese said he had never before attended a ballet function.

“After tonight we’ll probably buy season tickets,” he said.

Besides the $6,000 profit it netted, according to Wilcox, the major long-term benefit of the event was the increased visibility it gave the struggling ballet company--which operates on $700,000 a year. “We wanted (the evening) to be memorable for everyone. There are lots of new contacts here--lots of people in high positions,” he said, referring to the local opinion makers and potential new patrons in attendance.

Ballet officials say they plan to make the fund-raising banquet an annual event and are forming an advisory task force to plan further fund raising.

In the meantime, they say, they hope to begin changing the commonly held perception that things associated with ballet are boring and inaccessible, a goal that seemed to be meeting with some success in the case of at least one banquet attendee.

“This was a great party,” said a surprised Diana Treese, Bob’s wife, as the affair began winding down. “Everyone expected it to be stuffy.”